Fantasy

The third season of HBO’s lavish fantasy “Game of Thrones” concluded with a stunning finale Sunday — though it would be difficult for anything to live up to the gut-punch impact of last week’s “The Rains of Castamere” and its depiction of the Red Wedding, one of the most harrowing set pieces from the George R.R. Martin “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels that inspired the series. Among the many interesting turns of events in the season’s concluding installment, “Mhysa” — and anyone who did not see the finale might want to stop reading now: Jaime Lannister finally returned to King’s Landing. His homecoming, however, might have been somewhat less auspicious than the kingslayer once would have expected. “Finally he’s back,” Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau said in an interview with Hero Complex late last week. “I think that moment, he […]

Last August, Weird Tales magazine, long a fixture on the speculative fiction landscape, got hit with a heavy dose of online fury. The publication had made plans to publish an excerpt from an ecologically themed dystopian novel in which whites are the oppressed minority and their oppressors are referred to as “coals.” Those who attacked the work were upset by a number of elements seen as racially problematic, up to and including the title, “Saving the Pearls,’’ “pearls” being the book’s term for white people and a word read as charged with an altogether different tenor than the notion of “coals.” In response to the outcry, the magazine pulled the excerpt. Online protests and allegations of racial weirdness in science fiction and fantasy are hardly new, but they began to seriously come to a head with the still contentious Internet […]

This post has been corrected. See the note below for details. “Mirror Mirror” on the wall: Will this fantastical twist on the tale of Snow White take home Oscar gold Sunday night at the 85th annual Academy Awards? [For the Record, 12:15 p.m., Feb. 20: Someone needs to get her fairy tales straight. An earlier version of this post said that “Mirror Mirror” was a fantastical twist on Sleeping Beauty. It’s a retelling of Snow White.] The lavishly costumed film starring Julia Roberts as the evil monarch who envies fresh-faced newcomer Lily Collins nabbed top honors Tuesday at the 15th annual Costume Designers Guild Awards, winning for excellence in fantasy film. The guild awards come as the award season races toward its climactic finale, Oscar Sunday. The win suggests that “Mirror Mirror” could be the front-runner for the costume design Oscar. […]